


Convergence

by suilven



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26425456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suilven/pseuds/suilven
Summary: In this moment, he wonders how two people could possibly be so attuned to one another, bound in a way that transcends every other relationship he’s ever had.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 32
Kudos: 87
Collections: X-Files Episode Fanfic Exchange (2020)





	Convergence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FridaysAt9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FridaysAt9/gifts).



> Written for the X-Files Episode Exchange II 2020 for the FridaysAt9 who requested:
> 
> Episode: Hungry  
> Prompt: This episode follows the touchstone scene and the two of them look amazing when they enter the burger place. I would like something about what happened before this episode (keeping the touchstone thing in mind) and have it run into this one. They look like people who have had a shift in their relationship.

She feels like a fool standing outside his door, clutching the paper bag full of groceries a little too tightly. What is she doing here? It’s five in the morning, and Mulder is probably asleep. Maybe she should have called first, but in a fit of the paradoxical nonsense that seems to have infiltrated her synapses, she hadn’t wanted to wake him. Her heart still feels like it did when he was missing: pinched and tight like a shrivelled up apple. She just needs to see him, to satisfy herself that he’s really here, that he’s okay. It’s not logical, but she somehow has an easier time accepting that level of irrationality now than she used to.

Forcing a deep exhalation out through her nose, she slides the key into the lock and turns it. 

This was a stupid idea. 

She’ll creep in quietly, put the few things that need to go in the fridge and freezer away, and leave the rest on his kitchen table. With any luck, he’ll be sound asleep and she can be in and out without him even realizing she was there.

The hinges creak as she pushes the door open slowly, but it’s still and dark inside Mulder’s apartment; to her surprise, not even the flickering light of the TV illuminates the living room. The grocery bag crinkles as she shifts it so she can slide her keys back into her jacket pocket. Slipping off her shoes, she makes her way to the kitchen as silently as she can, hoping not to trip over an errant pair of runners as her eyes haven’t adjusted yet from the brightness of the hallway. 

Success.

She sets the bag down on the table and pulls out a carton of milk and one of orange juice, a tub of cream cheese, eggs, a package of hot dogs, and a frozen pepperoni pizza. The rest of the bag: coffee, bagels, bread, hot dog buns, apples, bananas, and a jar of peanut butter; can all stay where it is. The pizza goes in the freezer — a tight squeeze in between the metal shelf and the growing glacier of ice that takes up most of the space — and her suspicions are confirmed when she opens the fridge and leans down to peer inside. A Chinese food take out container, a grease-stained pizza box, and nothing else (she’d thrown out the various mold colonies procreating happily in there during his absence). 

Once the last item is in the fridge, she stands up and closes the door, mentally congratulating herself on a stealthy job well done. She’ll just go take a quick look at Mulder sleeping on the couch, make sure he’s still breathing, and then she’ll be on her way with him none the wiser. Perfect.

“What are you doing, Scully?”

She nearly jumps out of her skin. “Jesus, Mulder!”

He’s standing at the entrance to the kitchen, chest bare, with a thin pair of pyjama pants hanging low around his hips. He already looks more filled out than when she last saw him, but the toll of what he’s been through is still evident in the loss of muscle on his lean frame. The front of his hair is tousled as he blinks at her sleepily, and she can’t help taking a moment to stare, to drink him in with her eyes, to savour the fact that he’s _here_ — not lost, not in danger. His head is no longer wrapped in bandages and he’s healing.

“I… I didn’t mean to wake you.” She gestures at the bag on the table. “I thought you could use some basic necessities since I know grocery shopping isn’t really your thing.”

He gives a half grin and steps forward. “In the middle of the night? Scully, you shouldn’t have.”

“It’s not the middle of the night.” She tries not to sound defensive, but it’s hard when she’s already feeling more than a little ridiculous. “It’s technically morning.”

Mulder squints at the digital numbers on the microwave. “I suppose you’re _technically_ correct. It just seems a little early. I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of waking you up more than once and I think I can safely state that you’re not exactly a morning person.”

She can’t help the huff of a laugh that escapes. “No. Not exactly.”

He folds his arms across his chest and leans casually back against the counter, watching her. He doesn’t say anything, and even though she’s very well aware of this particular psychology trick, she finds herself filling in the silence with what he wanted to know.

“I couldn’t sleep.” She flicks her eyes away before meeting his gaze. It feels weirdly intimate, standing together in the darkness, and she finds herself admitting more than she meant to. “I was so afraid of not finding you in time. It’s a hard feeling to shake.”

“I know.”

His voice is barely a whisper but it thrums with intensity, and she hears it as clearly as if she can feel his breath against the shell of her ear and she shivers. 

The weight of the emotion in his words is like the drop of a boulder into the open maw of emptiness inside her, clattering off the sides of this cavern she’s seemingly at the bottom of. 

He knows. Of course he does. She was missing once, too, and the realization hits her all at once and she’s staggered. She sits down, her back against the closed fridge door, needing the illusion of solid ground beneath her, behind her, to hold her up.

It has crossed her mind once or twice that she and Mulder are two halves of the same whole: logic and belief, faith and questioning. A sense that they are bound together, the actions of one reverberating through the life of the other, like the strings on a harp. He _had_ been where she was now, understood like no one else ever could. She remembered the descriptions from her mom and Missy about how Mulder had been when she was missing: “climbing the walls”; “he called me every day”; “I think he was actually sleeping nights in the hospital waiting room”.

He sits down next to her, the side of his leg warm against hers while the rest of her feels so very cold, chilled. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She manages a nod, her hand fumbling for his. “It just sort of hit me all at once, you know.” 

* * *

When she sinks to the floor, he’s crossing the kitchen without a second thought. He forgets how small she is most of the time, the disparity between her stature and her overwhelming presence in his life never more at odds than right now, with her thin arms wrapped around the knees she’s clutching to her chest, as if she could somehow take up even less room.

Even without the gauzy whispers of her thoughts still fluttering through the breeze of quiet consciousness around him, he would have known, can understand exactly where her thoughts and emotions have taken her because he once stood here, too. 

He wraps an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close as they sit, sides pressed tightly together. He feels the shudder of her breath against the warmth of his neck, feels the nuanced swirl of relief, guilt, reluctance along with the image of himself asleep in a hospital bed and the warmth of her tear-stained cheek pressed against the back of his hand.

On the other side of the coin, he remembers having done the same, when hers was the life slipping away and he was the one struggling with the prospect of a life without her. In this moment, he wonders how two people could possibly be so attuned to one another, bound in a way that transcends every other relationship he’s ever had.

“When you were gone, Scully, they tried to convince me you were dead. But I knew you weren’t. I just knew it.” His breath ruffles the loose strands of hair on the top of her head and she squeezes his fingers tighter. “But seeing you in the hospital didn’t seem real. I was afraid to leave, afraid that they’d find some way to take you again, afraid that it was all a dream that I was going to wake up from. You don’t want to know how many nights I slept in that terrible plastic chair by your bed because I needed to see you, to touch you, to make sure you were really there. I don’t think my spine has ever truly recovered.”

He’s rewarded with a noise that sounds like a cross between a chuckle and a sob.

“Those chairs are awful,” she mutters into the side of his chest.

“Now picture being six feet tall instead of your five and change.” He can feel the tightness in her loosen a little more but she’s still all knots and tension like the growing ball made of multi-coloured rubber bands in the top drawer of his desk.

“I still have nightmares about it, although not as often as I used to. About never finding you. About being too late. Story of my life, right?”

They lapse into silence and her thoughts are like waves, rolling and crashing against the packed sand shoreline of his awareness. It’s comforting, being able to sense her in this new way, and he wonders if it will last. He doesn’t think it will — he couldn’t feel anything from the guy who delivered his pizza last night, and he’s grateful for the fact that he’s no longer being bombarded by the emotional maelstrom of his neighbours. But it might be different with her. Things usually are.

The sky outside is beginning to lighten, the first hints of sun chasing away the deeper darkness that had pooled along the floorboards, sending it scurrying away into hidden cracks and crevices and leaving only the pale gloom to paint long shadows across the linoleum. As always, Scully’s hair seems to glow with a life of its own — rich and warm — and he rubs a lock of it between his fingers, remembering all too well when it had been as grey and lifeless as the shadows, brittle and breaking. He’d find traces of it on her desk, on the floor behind her chair; the fallen leaves of an unexpected autumn.

* * *

As much as she doesn’t want to move, the floor is getting uncomfortable and her hips are starting to ache. Her stomach grumbles noisily as she shifts her weight, and Mulder laughs.

“Hungry?”

“A bit,” she admits. “I’ve been too preoccupied to eat on a regular schedule.”

“Well, you’re in luck.” He stands up, still a little slower than normal, and extends a hand down to help her up. “I happen to have, uh…” He pauses to peer into the brown paper bag still on the kitchen table and his eyes light up. “Coffee! And bagels. And probably cream cheese?” he guesses and she nods.

“Eggs and orange juice, too.”

“Sounds like breakfast.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” she agrees with a smile. It’s so easy to fall back into their comfortable rapport, like nothing has changed. The ghost of Diana is still there, but it’s easier to ignore now, to push it back into his past where it belongs. _She_ is his constant, his touchstone. No one else. She knows it to be true now, deep in the marrow of her bones, and she’s glutted herself on the words he’d offered up. She believes.

They make breakfast together as if they’d done it a million times before, in an easy rhythm without needing to speak. Mulder cracks eggs into a bowl and whisks them up before pouring them into a hot frying pan while she cuts and toasts bagels, spreading each one with a thick layer of cream cheese. He measures out coffee grounds and adds water to the coffee maker; she gets out mugs and plates and forks along with the cartons of milk and juice. By the time he’s scooping mounds of scrambled eggs next to the bagels on their plates, she’s pouring each of them a steaming mug of coffee. They look at one another across the table as they pull out their chairs at the same time.

She can’t help the grin that breaks across her face to match his. “Team work… it makes the dream work.”

A look of mock horror crosses his face. “Don’t tell me you were actually _listening_ during that last seminar Skinner sent us to? Scully, I’ve lost all respect for you.”

She sits down, suddenly starving now that the food is right in front of her, and slides her plate closer before picking up her fork. “Well, one of us had to. You have to do the next one, though and I get to copy off _your_ answers.” She mumbles the last sentence through a mouthful of eggs.

“Please, Scully,” he sits down, reaching for his bagel, “you _always_ pay attention. Tell me, have you ever skipped a class in your life. Be honest.” He takes a large bite out of his bagel and leans back in his chair, raising one eyebrow at her.

“Wow, Mulder, and here I thought you knew me so well.” She sets her fork down and leans in conspiratorially towards him. “I don’t think you’re ready to hear what I got up to in college.” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as seductively as it does — okay, maybe a little, but not in the husked whisper that unexpectedly emerges from her lips. She tries to keep the cat-like smugness out of her expression as his Adam’s apple bobs and he gives a dry cough as his bite of bagel doesn’t go down as smoothly as he’d thought.

The moment hangs there between them, a gossamer thread stretching and then breaking as she averts her eyes, takes a careful swallow of her coffee.

“Well, maybe someday I will be,” he says at last, shrugging and sipping at the contents of his own mug. “Sooner rather than later.” There’s the barest hint of a rise in intonation on the last word, the ghost of a question mark.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “I think so, too.”

They turn their attention to the food in front of them, Scully eating more than she has in days, and Mulder polishing off the rest with his familiar endless appetite. She finds herself blinking slower, as she savours the last few sips of coffee at the bottom of her mug, feeling content and sated. The sunlight streaming in is warm and peaceful as she stares at Mulder and he stares at her right back. Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed, and she realizes, from one slow blink to the next, that she’s happy.

* * *

“You look like you might fall out of your chair if you sit there any longer, Scully.” 

His voice makes her startle upright from her half-slumped posture, but she really had looked like her head was about to drop down into the crumbs of egg left on her plate. It’s so easy to tell when she isn’t sleeping well; the fine porcelain of her skin heightens rather than conceals the bruised purple blush below her eyes.

“Why don’t you go lie down for a while?” he offers. He can sense her reluctance, but the comfortable drowse she’s already in wins out.

“Maybe. Just for an hour.”

“Okay.” 

She stands up and pads toward the living room, but he takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom instead. There’s a question in her glance that he doesn’t answer, knowing that she’ll understand when she sees that the boxes that made his bedroom hard to navigate have been tidied away, that the bed is made, that the blankets are rumpled from when he was sleeping when she arrived earlier.

She sits down on the edge of the bed and he pulls the covers back so she can lie down. Once again, he’s struck by how small she seems as she puts her head on his pillow and settles in on her side, still facing him. He tucks the blankets in around her, then kisses her forehead gently. He moves to stand, to leave her to rest while he stretches out on the couch in the other room, but she stops him, her hand landing on his forearm with the delicateness of sparrow alighting on a branch.

“Mulder?” Her voice is soft in the hush of the room. “Stay.”

He nods, moves around the bed to slide in behind her, drawing the warmth of her body against his own. She sighs, loose and content, her legs finding his as she pulls his arms around her.

Together, they drift off into slumber, cherishing the brief respite offered to them. 

He holds her close — she pulls him closer still — and, together, they dream.

* * *

_A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together, is reality._

_\- Yoko Ono_

**Author's Note:**

> Super special thanks to my amazing beta, the wondrous Josie Lange.


End file.
